At least 1.3 billion people around the world have no access to basic health care, and the reason for that is often a deficit of health workers.

WHO reported that Africa, which accounts for 11 percent of the world population, has 25 percent of the disease burden and only three percent of all health workers.

Health workers not only include doctors, nurses, and lab technicians, but also management and support personnel such as public health professionals, finance and procurement officers, planners and hospital staff.

But the WHO definition also encompasses a woman caring for her child, sons or daughters who accompany their parents to the hospital, or traditional healers who make use of ancestral knowledge to assist and comfort.

WHO Assistant Director General Timothy Evans highlighted the "enormous" inequalities in the distribution of the world´s 60 million health workers across different regions. In Africa, there are about 2.3 health workers per 1,000 inhabitants, as compared to 24 per 1,000 in the Americas.

Africa and South-East Asia, which have the highest global burdens of disease - 25 and 27 percent respectively - have the fewest health workers per capita, while the Americas, the region with the lowest burden of disease, has the highest number of health workers.